Фильм «Гельветика»

Документалка про сторонников и противников модернизма, который представляет шрифт «Гельветика». Одни говорят, что в работе нужен порядок и правила, другие — что нельзя так скучно жить.

Показывают много знакомых лиц (Виньелли, Кроувела, Шпикермана, Цапфа и других), ну и красивые картинки, конечно, постоянно.

Несколько цитат из фильма:

There are people that think that type should be expressive. They have a different point of view than mine. I don’t think type should be expressive at all. I can write the word ‘dog’ with any typeface and it doesn’t have to look like a dog. But there are people that think when they write ‘dog’ it should bark!

It was a little more machined, it was doing away with these manual details in it, and we were impressed by that, because it was more neutral. And neutralism was a word that we loved. It should be neutral; It shouldn’t have a meaning in itself. It should… the meaning is in the content of the text, not in the typeface.

I rather dreaded the moment of having to explain to someone… You know, you find yourself sitting next to some nice person on a plane or a train and they ask you sooner or later what you do. And if you say ‘type designer’, they generally look completely blank. Occasionally, someone will actually know the term but then will say, ‘I thought they were all dead.’

When you talk about the design of Haas Neue Grotesk or Helvetica, what it’s all about is the interrelationship of the negative shape, the figure-ground relationship, the shapes between characters and within characters, with the black if like, with the inked surface. And the Swiss pay more attention to the background, so that the counters and the space between characters just hold the letters. I mean you can’t imagine anything moving; it is so firm.

The marketing director at Stempel had the idea to give it a better name because Neue Haas Grotesk didn’t sound very good for a typeface that was intended to be sold in the United States. Stempel suggested the name of Helvetia. This is very important: Helvetia is the Latin name of Switzerland. My father said, that’s impossible. You cannot call a typeface after the name of a country. So he said, why don’t you call it Helvetica. So in other words this would be the Swiss typeface.

It’s a default. It’s air, you know, it’s just there. There’s no choice. It brings style with it; every typeface does. Well, it’s like a person, if you are slightly heavy in the middle you’re not going to walk around in tight T-short. You’d look like an idiot. And Helvetica is heavy in the middle. So it needs certain space around it, needs a lot of white space; it needs very carefully to be looked at the weight gradations. It needs a lot of space sideways also. All the letters… it’s the whole Swiss ideology; the guy who designed it tried to make all the letters look the same. Hello? You know, that’s called an army. That’s not people. That’s people having the same fucking helmet on. It doesn’t further individualism.

In the ’70s, the young generation was after psychedelic type, and all the junk that you could find. And also in the ’80s, with their minds completely confused by that… disease that was called Postmodernism, people were just going around like chickens without their heads, by using all kind of typefaces that came around that could say “not modern.”

There’s a very thin line between simple and clean and powerful, and simple and clean and boring.